The PRIVATE Sector

Con-signia may be on the way out

About the only good thing to come out of the organisation formerly known as the post office in recent weeks is that it is to reverse its much-ridiculed name change from Royal Mail to Consignia (silly pseudo-Latin handles and swirly logos might impress city slickers, but don't inspire confidence among the down-to-earth stamp-buying masses, it seems).

The scale of the mess at the company beggars belief - 40,000 jobs are to go over three years, beginning with 15,000 losses at Parcelforce (apparently these will all be voluntary) - but behind this big announcement lie years of labour disputes, low worker morale, declining service and piecemeal privatisation. The Communication Workers Union was understandably upset by the proposals, and mustered 3,000 for a march in London on 16th March protesting at the privatisation plans, but is staying clear of threatening strike action unless compulsory redundancies are proposed. However, it is withdrawing £500,000-worth of political donations to New Labour over the next three years in protest over the party's never-ceasing rightward drift.

Bit by bit, postal services are being 'liberalised' - parcel delivery has long been a purely commercial venture, express mail services have been 'opened up', the monopoly on bulk business mail (the most profitable part of Consignia's current business) will soon disappear, and it looks as if the mundane, unprofitable, everyday business of delivering people's letters and providing post offices will soon be all the once-mighty post office has left. Even the post offices are under threat - rural post offices are suffering loss of revenue and many are closing, while 540 urban post offices closed last year. This is partly due to the drive to pay benefits directly into recipients' bank accounts, meaning they do not need to be collected from post offices and the offices lose that source of revenue. In this atmosphere of gloom, it seemed hardly surprising when news finally got out on 31 March that the government had been discussing selling the company off to Dutch postal group TPG - ten days earlier Lord Sainsbury on behalf of the DTI had denied talks were going on.

But perhaps sale to a famously efficient company with an excellent labour relations record would do Consignia/Royal Mail good? Well, possibly, if you think it's just another company. But besides being part of the national consciousness and culture (Night Mail, red pillarboxes, Postman Pat and his black and white cat, etc.), and providing the cheapest postal service in the EU other than Spain, the nationalised post office has been required to provide services which are anything but economically efficient but enormously socially useful; particularly collection and delivery services and post offices in rural areas. Will 'liberalisation' and privatisation mean these services end up cut or downgraded? It's hard to see how they wouldn't.

Communication Workers' Union: www.cwu.org